Born To Be Happy

Mark Schafer is an award-winning visual artist and literary translator and a community art activist and organizer. His artwork includes collage, creative maps, tree-based art installations, and the illustrations for Born To Be Happy, a children's book he wrote. He has created installations for The Banff Centre for the Arts (Alberta, Canada), Fruitlands Museum (Harvard, MA) and the Hawthorne Youth and Community Center (Roxbury, MA). In 2021 he formed the artist collective The Roxbury Electric Illuminating Company with Yvon Augustin, and together they created a winter light installation at HYCC. This year, with the support of two grants from the Mayor's Office of Boston, REIC organized a coding workshop at for local teens to help them create the next generation light installation at HYCC. As a art activist, he has successfully organized a community effort to have Roxbury Community College install an informational plaque by John Wilson's sculpture "Father and Child Reading;" co-led the "Africa to America" Mural Relocation Project, which saved this mural and created a two-semester community art project class at RCC to redesign, create and install a new version of the mural; and conceived of and co-organized the "A Great Day in Roxbury's Highland Park" photo of seventy-eight neighborhood Elders and the Highland Park Honoring Our Elders Coalition, formed to carry on the work of honoring the elders of Highland Park, Roxbury.